CamStudio 2.7 and corporate environments

2.7 has some great improvements, and I'm glad to see that significant progress is being made.

Unfortunately, it looks like some of the changes make it difficult or impossible to use Camstudio in a corporate network environment.

One change I'm not happy about is the new default save location for videos. Saving documents under program files has been frowned on for years, and in the latest Windows OS versions, especially in a corporate environment, it's very problematic. A limited user trying to record with CamStudio 2.7 sees what looks like a recording session starting up, but nothing actually happens, no video is recorded, and there's no error message to tell the user that there's a problem. It just silently fails to work, which has caused some serious frustration for some of my users until I figured out what was going on.

It's possible to work around this by changing the default location to one the user has access to, but that leads to my second problem: How can I deploy the program with customized default settings? Previously I could just deploy a customized INI file to the program folder. Now the individual users' settings are stored in the user's profile, which is fine, but the default settings they're based on seem to be hard-coded somewhere I can't identify.

Also the settings don't seem to recognize or make use of Windows environment variables. For example, I would expect to be able to use values like %LOCALAPPDATA% or %USERPROFILE% in the configuration, but these aren't recognized.

Am I just missing something? How are others handling these issues?

Comments

No, you're not missing anything. I never made the point clear enough that we should never be saving inside the Program Files folder(s) ever ever ever as most modern systems are set up with security settings not allowing writing to that sacred space.

I wrote Nick an email to pass along to future programmers about this, but it is my fault for never being explicit about this point. The original 2.0 version did this saving to the program folder business routinely and willy-nilly without guilt or conscience .

Keep watch - if we could muck it up this easily, we can probably un-muck it using the same techniques. Or, as Will Rogers asked famously, "If stupidity got us into this mess, then why can't it get us out?" On this occasion, we may yet prevail!

Thanks for the response. Is there a way for me to change the starting default values?

When a user launches the program for the first time, they see the message "CamStudio.cfg Config file was not found. Using defaults." Where are those defaults coming from? Is this in another file somewhere, or is it hard coded?

Nick just wrote me back that he is making this a priority change to the way the program works and has already spoken with the programmer. I'll let you know when he lets me know that the new version is available. When that happens, un-install the old one, clear your cache and reload the download page. If you have a problem with that I'll send you a direct link to it.

There ARE several files in the user's applications directory.

You may want to review any profile or .ini files in the hidden folder at Users/(username)/AppData/Roaming directory.

As you likely already know (but I'll mention it for completeness!), make hidden folders visible frm the top left of any folder view from the Organize dropdown, selecting "Folder and Search Options" and then the View tab, selecting "Show Hidden Files" frm the Hidden Files and Folders section.